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We finally found the problem that has been plaguing us for years. The situation is a 3 node 2008 R2 Hyper-V cluster. When trying to live migrate a virtual machine off of one node to another it fails. Trying to logon to the host machine fails with the message of no logon servers. In the past we ended up rebooting the host and taking an outage and never figured out why. This third time we dug a bit deeper before rebooting and found out there was port exhaustion.

Here is how we found the problem: http://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2014/10/viewing-killing-tcp-ip-connections-windows/

There were thousands of ports in the TIME_WAIT state. So after digging some more we found the hotfix: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2553549

We did find out that doing a quick migration still works and each virtual machine only took about a minute, so that limited our downtime significantly.

I was doing some drawing updates using Visio yesterday and noticed that I couldn’t move a selected shape using the arrow keys. I figured it was just some configuration in the file and I’d try to figure it out later. This morning I’m working in Excel and notice that the arrow keys scroll the window instead of moving to another cell. A quick google search revealed it was caused by scroll lock being on. Yep; and now I remember I was cleaning my keyboard yesterday and must have inadvertently hit that key.

Here is a strange problem. Comcast recently doubled my internet speed according to an insert in my bill. I have performance internet which means I should be getting 25Mbps download speeds. Doubled I will get 50Mbps! This is nice. I follow the instructions to power cycle the modem, then the router and blow off rebooting the PC since I know that is not needed. A quick speed test and I’m getting a whopping 16Mbps download? Read more…

I learned a new trick today that I want to pass along. Have you ever had some joker in the office mess with your machine when you’ve stepped away without locking your system? One of the worst is when someone goes into the video settings and rotates your screen 90 degrees. You could either rotate your head or turn your mouse sideways or maybe even physically rotate your screen so you can set it back to normal. But there is an easier way with a keyboard shortcut. Simply hold down Ctrl and Alt and then push the UP arrow key. The other arrow keys will rotate your screen left, right, or upside down. This should stop the joker from pulling this prank. Better yet, if you have an office joker and he leaves his machine unlocked, just walk by and give him a quick Crtl, Alt arrow of your choice. Just beware the repercussions, and always use the Windows Key + L when you step away from your computer.

We had a situation where we needed to delete a recovery point. Of course there is no way to do it using the GUI and Technet has an awesome (useless) explanation on how to do it using powershell

After a little searching I found this blog entry which works perfectly. In short here are the steps for removing a recovery point. As some point I may write an interactive script to simplify everything. I modified the code from the original blog posting to add the array number in front of the output to make things a little easier.

It said it was open for 5 minutes as a warning to let me know that I might have forgotten to close it. Actually I had purposefully left it open to test a device I built based on a couple blog entries from Richard L. Lynch. Now I don’t know Richard, but I found his postings when searching for a solution to absent mindedly leaving the garage door open. Since we have smart phones on us at all times, a simple e-mail from the garage door would be great if it was open for too long. Richard came up with an elegant solution using a Raspberry Pi and a small Python program hooked up to a garage door sensor. The posts could use some updates for the current Raspberry Pi model B+ but they work. Here are the 2 posts by Richard.

You won’t need to USB hub with the B+ model since it has plenty of USB ports. I used CAT 5 cable to connect the sensor to the Pi in the basement. I chose the basement to mount the Pi since it will be out of the elements and kept cool for the most part.

I’m planning on getting another Pi so I can load Mono on it and write the code in C# which is what I’m used to.

It took me a while to find this so I decided to make an entry here in case anyone else runs across this problem. I’m working on a spreadsheet for IP address management and have have a column for the CIDR. /26 for example. The problem is that as soon as you hit the / key a bunch of letters pop up over the ribbon. The same thing happens when you hit the Alt key. To stop this click File | Options | Advanced and scroll all the way down to Lotus Compatibility and you’ll see Microsoft Excel menu key. Remove the / in that box and click OK. Now you can type a / in a cell without the keyboard menu popping up.